New, "Amazingly Clear" Apollo 11 Moon Video Discovered. Maybe

This just in from the Department of Suspiciously Timed Discoveries: The Daily Express in London, which is in some country that is not the US, is reporting that the original, long-thought-missing tapes from Apollo 11's walk on the moon have been discovered.

As the tabloid paper tells it in a "World Exclusive," the original, "amazingly clear" tapes were found when "scientists looking for other data stumbled across a number of Nasa tapes in a storage facility in Perth, Australia."

The original video was downloaded to an observation in Perth from the moon, where it was fiddled with before it could be shown, the paper says.

From the moon, the signal was beamed to the Earth's closest tracking station at the Parkes Observatory in Australia where, along with other important data, it was recorded on to high-grade magnetic tapes.

From there, the raw images were downsized to American television resolutions by a special scanner in Sydney, heavily compressed so they could be transmitted live, and then relayed to the US via the Intelsat III satellite.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

The paper says a NASA spokesman was cagey when confronted with the news, hinting an announcement might be made in a few weeks for the 40th anniversary of the landing and saying the agency was "not likely to scoop ourselves on much."

On the other hand, another feature story in today's Express begins "A CHRISTIAN schoolboy has been converted to Islam in Britain at a road-show orchestrated by a notorious Muslim hate preacher," so who knows?

We just hope this new video, if it exists, has lots of weird shadows to feed the "It was a hoax!!" flames.